How To Get Quicker Feet

How to Get Quicker Feet? If you are an athlete who’s always slow to respond to the ball or get into good defensive position, then you most likely lack the essential strength on your hip extensor muscles for a quick first step which in return will give you a faster start.

The Gluteus Maximus is possibly the primary muscle to key on in this group. That is due in part to its large square-shaped dimensions and the fact it is the strongest of all of the extensors. Being the most superficial muscle in the buttocks area, it provides the body with a characteristic form.

Because it crosses the hip joint straight (the hip joint is a ‘ball and socket joint’ in which the ball is the head of the femur that inserts into the ‘socket’, that is the acetabulum formed by the ilium, ischium and pubis bones) it is capable of creating a very powerful action of the femur on it.

Another three muscles, while collectively called the hamstrings, is not entirely right as they relate to hip extension. This is because the hamstrings also include the short head of the Biceps Femoris, but as we stated earlier, the short head produces no action on the extension because it doesn’t cross the hip joint.

Provided that you’re aware of this, it is not uncommon to still refer to them as such, and it will be assumed that the reader is conscious of the fact throughout the rest of this report.

The long head of the Biceps Femoris starts at the tuberosity of the ischium, which can be the originating point for the Semitendinosus muscle. The long-run extends down past the knee joint and combines with the brief head to fit into the lateral side of the fibular head. Since the long run crosses two joints, the hip, and the knee, it is going to produce action on both that is a hip extension and knee flexion.

The short head of the Biceps Femoris originates on the middle third of the posterior femur, and therefore it’s nowhere close to the hip joint being that it appears so much lower than it. Thus, this is why it is excluded as an extensor of the hip.

How To Get Quicker Feet

The Semitendinosus is famous for its long curved tendon and is visible (See Picture Above). The tendon crosses the knee joint and inserts into the anterior, upper and medial area of the tibia.

The Semimembranosus originates in the superior and lateral part of the ischium just to the surface of where the long head of the Biceps Femoris and Semitendinosus originate. Like the other two hamstring muscles, it crosses the hip and the knee making similar activities on them.

Since the hamstrings have two purposes, hip extension, and knee flexion, we’ll save our discussion concerning knee flexion for a different report.

The hip extensors are a strong group of muscles.

These muscles are actively engaged in the majority of the exercises in which a pushing movement, or force, happens like front squats, back squats, power cleans (about the legs only), clean/pulls (again, about the legs only) and box jumps to name a few.

Pushing forces are forces that cause movement away from the origin of the force. In the cases above, you’re providing force against the floor through your leg muscles (hip extensors and knee extensors) to move away from it. To put it differently, you’re pushing upward and off with your legs.

How To Get Quicker Feet

The hamstring curl is an excellent example of a pulling-type of exercise for your legs. Here, you’re directing force created on your hamstrings through the back of your thighs to a padded bar carrying weight toward your buttocks. To put it differently, you’re causing motion in the kind of your legs moving toward the origin, your hamstrings, therefore by definition, you’re pulling the weight near you.

When it comes to running, the hip extensor muscles are involved in both pushing and pulling you forward during the movement, but many are unaware of the fact and instead only find the hip extensors as good pushers from the running motion, not pullers.

But from the article about the Running Motion, we learned that the hip extensors both pull and push. And to ascertain which sort of drive your leg was supplying, a reference point required to be established because the vast majority of the running motion was occurring in the horizontal plane.

It was there that we decided that if your thigh was vertical to the floor that this was the dividing point between the muscles that pull and those that push.

How To Get Quicker Feet

How To Get Quicker Feet – Push and Pull

It was pointed out that if your foot was on the floor and your thigh was supporting this reference line of the hip, (i.e., the thigh was no longer perpendicular to the floor ), your hip extensor muscles (in addition to the knee extensors and ankle plantar-flexors) were pushing you forward. SeeFigure 3above.

This matches the definition of a pushing force where movement is made away from the origin of the force. The source of the force is that the joint effect of muscles on your

How To Get Quicker Feet

It was also pointed out that if your foot was on the floor and your thigh was in the front of the reference line for the hip, your hip extensor muscles would pull you forward as you conducted. See Figure 5 below.

How To Get Quicker Feet

What brings this to our attention and the way this happens is as follows: first, remember what was spoke about before that a pulling force is a force which leads to a movement toward the source of the force. The origin of the force, in this case, is that the stretched hip extensor muscles (mainly the Gluteus Maximus) located in the rear of the buttocks.

With the origin of the muscle at the back and its insertion across the side and toward the front close to the greater trochanter of the femur, the movement it generates by contracting is to draw the duration of the whole femur (thigh) onto it, or beneath the runner’s body and hip.

We can observe the progression of the movement happening by following the position of the right thigh (yellow arrow) in Figures 6a, 6b and 6c below. Here, the thigh has been drawn beneath the runner’s body until eventually, it reaches a neutral or vertical position, where there’s neither flexion or extension of the thigh at the hip joint in Figure 6d.

How To Get Quicker Feet

Because this force (Gluteus Maximus) causes movement (the runner’s thigh) to move toward it, it’s by definition a pulling-type force.

As an athlete who’s worried about your running speed, it would be of great advantage to you to balance the amount of pushing and pulling exercises that you do between your hip extensor muscles.

A list of those pushing-type exercises has been previously mentioned. A conventional pulling-type of exercise between your hip extensors will be walking lunges in which the pull comes from the movement produced by the leg on the floor in front of you as it pulls you forward while preparing to take another step. This is much like the movement in the development of pictures above from Figure 6a through 6d.

Besides this instance, there are some extraordinary ones which you can do between resistance bands using an isometric training plan. These exercises can help isolate and pin down these muscles’ in a safe manner that permits you to exercise peak contraction force in them very quickly.

Why These Speed Training Exercises Produce Great Results

The reason these rate training exercises produce such fantastic results at fast conditioning your muscles to be fast and responsive is because during an isometric contraction with resistance bands, the muscles’ motor unit recruitment patterns are completely new and distinct than what’s been normally experienced by a muscle that hasn’t been conditioned with this sort of training.

While using the resistance band using an isometric strategy, each effort by the muscle in balancing and stabilizing the changing force of this band helps to create and re-enforce new neuro-pathways within the muscle. This procedure accelerates the development of speed, strength, and coordination within the muscle.

This muscular development becomes much more conspicuous the poorer the muscle gets because it tries to maintain the isometric position. This is because when the band can’t be held steady because of a weakening muscle, rapid and continuing little changes in the immunity level of this ring force the muscles to instantly react and change their normal motor unit recruitment pattern without resting so as to stabilize the ring. This sort of speed training exercise is of great benefit to the athlete.

You will receive even greater value when these approaches are implemented through a workout to joints in various planes and angles from what they normally perform in the gym.

Using this method the muscles are not as likely to become pre-conditioned into the guided pathways of the machines or similar exercises. Consequently, coordination difficulties, speed, and strength levels inside the muscles are then developed much beyond their present level.

Quicker muscle contraction rate is the net effect of these improvements in strength and coordination.

Additional targeting the muscles surrounding the stable, and significantly more aerodynamic, ball and socket joints of the shoulders and buttocks, opens up amazing possibilities for athletic improvement. This is because when these exercises are done on these joints that they typically involve all of the muscles that stabilize the joint.

Therefore, Isometric training exercises with the resistance group expose and then eliminates higher flaws in your muscles in ways you probably have never experienced before.

As a result of this, these kinds of speed training exercises fill a massive void in the practice of every athlete who has never before used this exceptional speed training strategy.

The muscles quickly become conditioned for speed and quickness in ways which are rarely attainable without using this sort of training method.